Press Contact: Bibi Martí, (202) 707-1639Public Contact: Poetry and Literature Center (202) 707-5394/5Contact: Request ADA accommodations five days in advance at (202) 707-6362Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or [email protected]

Authors Jared Carter and Debra Magpie Earling will read from their work at 6:45 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 9 in the sixth floor Mumford Room of the Library's Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser will speak briefly and introduce the writers. Tickets are not required; this event is free and open to the public.

Jared Carter's first collection of poems, "Work, for the Night Is Coming," won the Walt Whitman Award for 1980. His second, "After the Rain," received the Poet's Prize for 1995. "Les Barricades Mysterieuses," a sequence of villanelles, a French verse form, appeared in 1999.

Debra Magpie Earling's debut novel "Perma Red" was published in 2002. It follows the struggle of 16-year-old Louise White Elk to escape her life on the Flathead Indian Reservation in 1940s Montana. Earling is on the creative writing faculty at the University of Montana at Missoula.

Ted Kooser is the current Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. He is the author of 10 collections of poetry, most recently "Delights & Shadows" (2004). Kooser is a visiting professor in the English department of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. He resides in Garland, Neb.

For more information about the Library's Poetry and Literature Center and this event, call (202) 707-5394 or log on to www.loc.gov/poetry/.